Question

Let’s assume we only have one line to work with. We have string “fo0”, and we want to print each character a random amount of times, and redo that entire statement another random amount of times; Resulting in something like the following:

ffooooo000 ffffffoo00 fffo00000000

How does one go about doing this, using for loops or something similar?

As far as I’ve gotten:

import random; x = "fo0"; print "".join(x for i in range(0,random.randrange(0,40)))

All this results in is something like “fo0fo0fo0fo0fo0fo0“.

Answer 1

You can use something like the following. Below, s is the input string, char_rand_max is the maximum number of times a single character is repeated in a word, and str_rand_max is the maximum number of times to produce a word. Each character appears at least once, and there is at least one word.

import random

def rand_print(s, char_rand_max, str_rand_max):
    for i in range(random.randint(1, str_rand_max)):
        print ''.join([c*random.randint(1, char_rand_max) for c in s]),
    print

Examples:

>>> s = 'fo0'
>>> rand_print(s, 5, 5)
fffoooo0000

>>> rand_print(s, 5, 5)
fo000 fffffooo00000 ffooo00000 fffooo00 fffo0

>>> rand_print(s, 5, 5)
ffffo00 fffffooo00000 fffffo00000

One-line solution

You can, of course, do this all in one line, if you want. Rather than squashing the function from above into a single line, you can do the following:

from random import randint as ri; x = 'fo0'; \
    print ' '.join([''.join([c*ri(1, 5) for c in x]) for i in range(ri(1, 5))])

Note that I added a line break to make it more readable in the answer. Also, unlike the solution above, the maximum numbers of character repeats and words is hard-coded at five.